Yes I actually use Avisynth for the postprocessing of captured material. For viewing I can not connect to Avisynth as the BT878 capture cards latest drivers are for WinXP and I use DScaler that natively has support for it even in Win10 x64. Other TV card chipsets have severe problems with the C64 video signal.
I have a brief description of the setup here: http://retronn.de/imports/capture_setup.html

So which AVerMedia unit is the best for VGA capture?

Quick question, does anyone have experience with an Analog Way Octo plus scaler/switcher?
Want to use that device with 240p MSX/PS2 and some old VGA dos machines.

Bios capture with the visionrgb-pro2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x033S3s8qQA

The regular pro's going for $30 shipped on ebay for yanks. I still see blurry capture in new videos on youtube - doesn't need to be, not for $$ anyway, unless you're outside the us or do obscure stuff.

I wouldn't get the pro for above-30 fps capture, though, and you need something like my vcapturescaler to get good capture for multiresolution without lots of effort. Still seeing horizontal artefacting in some capture modes too, and the card doesn't like 14-pin vga connectors.

Have the VisionRGB pro with one input.
Afaik it cannot capure more than 30fps if I read the manual correctly.
What program did you use for capture? The supplied program has a strange format and not very useful for youtube.

The manual probably says lots. The card pushes the 70 fps of vga 13h and 60 fps at 640x480, but at higher res you probably take a hit. I run it in odd ways that limit performance for other reasons, so can't say for sure. I use a custom program - what's wrong with the card's own viewer's format? It seems to do pretty decent except for scaling quality, handling of multiple resolutions and for me it sometimes freezes even though the card's sending good data.

Use this utility to test the visionrgb's capture fps with whatever resolution it's tuned to: http://personal.inet.fi/muoti/eimuoti/vrgb_fps/vrgb_fps.zip

Run with 'vrgb_fps.exe 0 32' from the command line (give the last argument as 16 for 16-bit color rather than 24-bit). Tells you the number of frames the card's able to send out per second, without accounting for any time it would take to draw them to the screen. Exit with ctrl+c or by closing the console window. Exit before doing any capture recording, otherwise your fps is halved.

Tree Wyrm wrote:

Currently I'm using Startech USB3HDCAP and Micomsoft XPC-4. Lack of translation in XPC-4 firmware makes things somewhat challenging to navigate but its picture quality is really great and its scaler tries best to keep pixels without turning them into blurry mess. It comes with seemingly quite thick and detailed manual but naturally it is entirely in japaneese. Still digging through various options and controls the device offers and there's a lot to play with. I can simply play games in OBS preview screen without lag and record them too while at it. Granted I keep having to reset XPC and USB3HDCAP settings from time to time as I sometimes end up messing up configurations and there's no input anymore 😀

How does the XPC-4 handle the DOS text mode resolution and the lower-res VGA (320x200, 70hz) used by many games?

strygo wrote:

Tree Wyrm wrote:

Currently I'm using Startech USB3HDCAP and Micomsoft XPC-4. Lack of translation in XPC-4 firmware makes things somewhat challenging to navigate but its picture quality is really great and its scaler tries best to keep pixels without turning them into blurry mess. It comes with seemingly quite thick and detailed manual but naturally it is entirely in japaneese. Still digging through various options and controls the device offers and there's a lot to play with. I can simply play games in OBS preview screen without lag and record them too while at it. Granted I keep having to reset XPC and USB3HDCAP settings from time to time as I sometimes end up messing up configurations and there's no input anymore 😀

How does the XPC-4 handle the DOS text mode resolution and the lower-res VGA (320x200, 70hz) used by many games?

It does rather well. I can make screenshots or a video from OBS for comparison if anyone wants. DOS text modes, VGA and SVGA work fine in titles that I've played, I didn't run any specialized test programs, don't know any, but if anyone can point out what to test with I'll give it a try. It seems XPC-4 can be sensitive to certain graphics cards which results in slower switching between resolutions (still faster than VGA2HDMIPRO). Personally I like that it tries to keep image pixelated. There might be some sort of a noise filter which can be noticed at a very specific gradients, I'm not entirely sure what to think of that, may be there are options related to that but configuration being entirely in japaneese makes things a little difficult.

Tree Wyrm wrote:

strygo wrote:

Tree Wyrm wrote:

Currently I'm using Startech USB3HDCAP and Micomsoft XPC-4. Lack of translation in XPC-4 firmware makes things somewhat challenging to navigate but its picture quality is really great and its scaler tries best to keep pixels without turning them into blurry mess. It comes with seemingly quite thick and detailed manual but naturally it is entirely in japaneese. Still digging through various options and controls the device offers and there's a lot to play with. I can simply play games in OBS preview screen without lag and record them too while at it. Granted I keep having to reset XPC and USB3HDCAP settings from time to time as I sometimes end up messing up configurations and there's no input anymore 😀

How does the XPC-4 handle the DOS text mode resolution and the lower-res VGA (320x200, 70hz) used by many games?

It does rather well. I can make screenshots or a video from OBS for comparison if anyone wants. DOS text modes, VGA and SVGA work fine in titles that I've played, I didn't run any specialized test programs, don't know any, but if anyone can point out what to test with I'll give it a try. It seems XPC-4 can be sensitive to certain graphics cards which results in slower switching between resolutions (still faster than VGA2HDMIPRO). Personally I like that it tries to keep image pixelated. There might be some sort of a noise filter which can be noticed at a very specific gradients, I'm not entirely sure what to think of that, may be there are options related to that but configuration being entirely in japaneese makes things a little difficult.

How do the Startech USB3HDCAP and Micomsoft XPC-4 compare to each other? I read that the Startech uses the same chipset as the Micomsoft, but the two units look very different. The Micromsoft has buttons and a remote control. Superficial differences aside, can the Startech capture VGA (320x200, 70hz)? The Startech device costs less than half the price of a Micomsoft and is very competitive with other products that advertise the ability to capture in 1080p/60fps.

The Micomsoft XPC-4 is a video scan converter, not a capture device. The Micomsoft X-CAPTURE-1 is the same as the Startech USB3HDCAP.

Using a scan convertor in combination with a capture device is perfectly logical. I have been experimenting with the OSSC in combination with the DVI2PCIe, which seems much better behaved with some 15khz sources than capturing them directly with the card.

Also, for those with the DVI2PCIe, I have found that AmaRecTV is better for recording. The Epiphan DirectShow drivers don't always return the correct frame rate to programs like VirtualDub and land up capturing at the wrong speed.

Recently I aquired the AverMedia Live Gamer HD Lite and to my huge surprise it can capture crystal clear signals via Rec Central. The trick is to use an AGP card with DVI port on your Retro PC like in my case the Nvidia FX5900 and connect a DVI-HDMI cable from your AGP card to the Live Gamer HD. It can transmit even the bios bootup so I highly recommend it if you are on a budget.

Recently I've got Datapath VisionRGB E1S, seem like some medical equipment supply store on ebay has put up a number of used ones relatively cheap. I have to say out of all the other cards I tried before I think this is the best I've got so far. It can capture digital or analog via DVI-I port, it's switching resolutions very fast, 70hz for 'legacy resolutions' as well, RGB24 for proper colors and various other nifty things like forcibly maintain custom defined aspect ratio (like 4:3). However it's not ideal either. First of all it doesn't do audio capture, only video, you gonna have to use a separate audio card and potentially deal with a/v syncing later in post-production stage. It doesn't work with OBS studio, but there's a plugin for OBS classic which I have not tried yet. AmarecTV does work but shows image flipped vertically. Datapath provide simple output display application and the image is really good there. I don't even use XPC-4 with it.It has own RGBeasy API and perhaps there are more useful things there (vvbee's links above seem all went 404) but I've yet to check it out, hopefully there are ways to customize scaling filters and other nifty things.

NJRoadfan wrote:

The Micomsoft XPC-4 is a video scan converter, not a capture device. The Micomsoft X-CAPTURE-1 is the same as the Startech USB3HDCAP.

Yep. Which in turn are based off Yuan-Tech capture cards line up.

AlucarD86 wrote:

Recently I aquired the AverMedia Live Gamer HD Lite and to my huge surprise it can capture crystal clear signals via Rec Central. The trick is to use an AGP card with DVI port on your Retro PC like in my case the Nvidia FX5900 and connect a DVI-HDMI cable from your AGP card to the Live Gamer HD. It can transmit even the bios bootup so I highly recommend it if you are on a budget.

Of course it'll be crystal clear - your DVI output sends digital signal and that's what your capture card receives, it can't do analog anyway. No surprises there. But a few downsides are: it'll be left up to a graphics card to scale the output to resolution the capture card will use, and often times there's very little control over how this goes. Your graphics card essentially becomes the scaler unit in the video chain. Unfortunately this isn't an option for older cards without digital output, not to mention prices on something like V5500 Mac aren't funny at all.

I am quite happy with it, I mean it even has an Audio in so you can record the audio from the Retro PC. If you just want to stream some Win98SE or older games that card offers the best and cheapest solution. VGA capture and Dreamcast is a different monster, there I need to use converters which I hate 🙁

Tree Wyrm wrote:

It does rather well. I can make screenshots or a video from OBS for comparison if anyone wants. DOS text modes, VGA and SVGA work fine in titles that I've played, I didn't run any specialized test programs, don't know any, but if anyone can point out what to test with I'll give it a try. It seems XPC-4 can be sensitive to certain graphics cards which results in slower switching between resolutions (still faster than VGA2HDMIPRO). Personally I like that it tries to keep image pixelated. There might be some sort of a noise filter which can be noticed at a very specific gradients, I'm not entirely sure what to think of that, may be there are options related to that but configuration being entirely in japaneese makes things a little difficult.

Interesting. I've been trying a bunch of different scalers and have generally been dissatisfied with the results. I've tried the Gefen VGA to DVI, the Kramer VP-719DS, the Sewell Manta, and the Extron RGB 300 to HDMI. Of those, I've had the most success with the Extron. It handles resolution changes nicely and provides the cleanest image results. The image is still a bit fuzzy compared to say how the XRGB-Mini handles console content.

Have you tried any of those devices in order to offer a comparison? Or how it compares to the quality I see with the XRGB-Mini? The Extron was only $30, so I'm only interested in the XPC-4 if it can truly outshine the Extron.

If you can capture any shots of DOS, Doom, or classic Sierra games, I personally would love to see them. Thanks for the info!

AlucarD86 wrote:

I am quite happy with it, I mean it even has an Audio in so you can record the audio from the Retro PC. If you just want to stream some Win98SE or older games that card offers the best and cheapest solution. VGA capture and Dreamcast is a different monster, there I need to use converters which I hate 🙁

You're doing fine, I capture using DVI most of my DOS footage. Especially resolution changes are handled great. Nvidia does it very well, other cards not so great.

Delta force https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zujK14VL2uE
Tomb raider https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps85KIx2uKw

Tomb raider at 320x200 has thin horizontal artefacts, delta force at 320x240 does not that I notice. Whether this is an issue with the capture card or the voodoo is unknown. Both videos at 1440p.

Captured with the visionrgb-pro2 in linux from a windows virtual machine via pci passthrough. Whether the screen tearing in both videos is from this setup is unknown.

vvbee wrote:

Captured with the visionrgb-pro2 in linux from a windows virtual machine via pci passthrough. Whether the screen tearing in both videos is from this setup is unknown.

This is with an XPC-4? (Sorry, it wasn't clear to me in your reply.)

strygo wrote:

This is with an XPC-4? (Sorry, it wasn't clear to me in your reply.)

Nope. I recommend a capture card that has an API you can program so you can write your own scaler and adapt it as needed.

vvbee wrote:

Nope. I recommend a capture card that has an API you can program so you can write your own scaler and adapt it as needed.

Ah, thanks. I'm actually not interested in capturing. I'm trying to run my old PC to a modern LCD and hoping to learn whether the XPC-4 delivers high fidelity results.